Posts Tagged ‘ Planning ’

Planning on not knowing

November 16, 2011
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Planning on not knowing

I had a conversation with a seasoned project / program manager the other day, that revealed some fundamental flaws in how people deal with uncertainty, as well as how the failure to embrace constant learning short changes both the individual and the group.  A few details have been changed to protect the guilty….. In discussing how to plan for a fairly large and complex engineering development projects, I questioned why the baseline plan in his projects’ detailed schedules were often being done over and overwritten, or only went out a few months (which, inevitably, would be changed every couple...

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Swing and a Miss: On Failure

October 4, 2011
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Swing and a Miss: On Failure

In baseball, batting .500 is pretty good right? In basketball or hockey, staying above .500 pretty well guarantees at least a run at the playoffs. But? Doesn’t that still mean that the remaining .500 were failures? There is a quotation that I have heard attributed to hockey legend Wayne Gretzky that states; ‘You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take’ Yet in many small to medium businesses, any hint of the term failurecauses organizational apoplexy, stroke, and other defense mechanisms. Narrowing down Failure First, lets get one big thing clear, there are failures of ambition and there are failures from sloth or laziness. Quite simply, they are not the...

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Article Review: Supply Chain at the C-level

September 30, 2011
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Article Review: Supply Chain at the C-level

  Michael Koplov over at softwareadvice.com contacted me last week to write a review of his article, Consumer-Driven Technology Creates the Need for a C-Level Supply Chain Focus. The article focuses on the ascension of Tim Cook to the CEO position at Apple, following Steve Jobs’ decision to step down from the position due to health-related issues.  More accurately, Michael discusses Cook’s background in manufacturing and, even more accurately, in supply chain.  He writes: What’s most surprising about Cook’s move up the ladder at places like IBM, Compaq and then Apple, however, isn’t his track record or reputation, it’s...

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The recipe: From Estimating to Planning

September 22, 2011
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The recipe: From Estimating to Planning

Estimating is just one step along the way towards designing an executable project. The next thing that is necessary is a plan - and estimating is a quite different exercise from planning. A plan takes into account not just what needs to be done when, but how things move throughout the project, who moves them, when it will happen, what that movement enables or restricts, and an identification of what might change over the course of the project.

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Process And Inventory Turns

September 2, 2011
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Process And Inventory Turns

You will never find a magic technology tool that you buy and that will instantly start a waterfall of cash onto your bottom line. Technology? Sure – it can help automate or standardize a good process. But people have to be doing the hard work involved in those processes first.

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Chart(er)ing the plan for improvement

June 27, 2011
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Something I have to wonder about the high rate of failure of most process improvement projects – is how many of them are executed according to solid project management principles?  All too often, there are tales of failure describing a lack of senior management buy-in, however, that begs the question – if you didn’t have buy-in, how is it that you were able to get started?  Most likely, it was an effort to build up some momentum and then try and find greater support once things started rolling down hill (or to reduce resistance since no one wants to...

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it’s the computer that kills

June 10, 2011
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A frequent frustration I have surfaces whenever I encounter project teams whose first instinct is to crack open a spreadsheet/database/management app/anything else that resides on a laptop when they begin to plan out their work.  Very often, that instinct rests on a lack of genuine understanding of how to plan activities and an utter reliance on the tools – as if mastery of tools actually accomplishes anything. Yet, that’s exactly what so many project leads and functional heads are after – mastering a tool, over and above mastering the concepts that make using that tool more effective.  Most of...

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The uncommunicated solution

April 4, 2011
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I absolutely adore people with no understanding of the systemic impacts of their actions.  Unless, of course, I happen to be one of the unfrotunate victims.  Even then, they are amusing to watch as long as I don’t get too much of their mess on me. Here’s the tyical situation:  Someone with just enough authority (let’s call him “Betty”) to be dangerous is directed by someone with enough authority to be really dangerous (and let’s call him “Al”) to create a new policy.  If the organization doesn’t respond well do teamwork and collaborative decision making, what then transpires is...

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S.M.A.R.T.? No! SMART-Y PANTS!

March 25, 2011
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We’ve all been exposed to SMART objectives, usually in the context of the dreaded and much-maligned annual performance review.  The SMART concept applies to any goal-setting situation, though, such as project planning, business planning, personal productivity, etc.  They all employ this simple approach to deciphering what appear to be large, complex problems and breaking them down and aligning them with larger, over-arching goals.  SMART typically stands for something like this: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time-bound Simple enough, sure.  But if fails to address the one question that comes to the mind of just about everyone who has ever been...

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Analyze the Variance

February 25, 2011
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Analyze the Variance

I think one of the weakest areas of project management (other than planning, which is rarely ever done very well) that I’ve encountered is the Variance Analysis. When things are planned and measurements are taken to determine the status of things, there’s often very little attention paid to understanding the root cause of the issue, and even less done to write those things down very well. I’ve seen tasks overrun, and the explanation written as, “Costs were higher than expected.” Gee, thanks. You’re telling me, “We overran because we spent too much.” Nice job, Sherlock. Did you...

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Site Creator & Author: David M. Kasprzak

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